My Mac died and yet I bought apple stock!

Continuing on the discussion about apple stock price and market cap…

So when my Macbook Pro refused to boot this monday, I tried all the tips that apple support suggests and then decided to go to an apple store to meet one of their geniuses. My earlier phone experience with apple support had been horrible but I still decide to pay them a visit. The experience was flawless, I walk in and get greeted by a genius in less than 5 minutes and genius understands the things I have tried and without any further delay takes my laptop for a repair and changes the hard disk. At this time my frustration with bad quality changed into hard disk failure happen and I was not worried about data as I had been using a time machine.

So I get my laptop back in 2 days all ready to go and now is the part of restoring my data. This is where I say apple has put in the brains. The data restore process was the smoothest, 3 clicks and I had my computer in the state I left it on sunday night. Yes, three clicks and everything restored. There are lots of solutions out there in the market for backup but I can tell you that apple makes things just work.

So I think it is not about the quality, it is about interoperability. If you decide to go all apple and yes somebody would wonder why but lets say you do, then the experience you get is amazing… music setup in all rooms … three clicks, backup restore three clicks… sharing printer across macs and windows three clicks… So the effort that goes behind making software and hardware that works well together should not be under estimate. Eventually if as a customer I can get smooth experience in times of hardships (disk failures) I will go back to them and hence I bought an airport express!

Is it time to short AAPL?

If you have noticed recently the current market cap of apple is 70% of MSFT market cap. So is it time to short apple stock?

Recently at a poker night, somebody pointed out this interesting fact and claimed that it is time to short apple. This was starting of a religious fight between the mac lovers and others. Mac lover in this case was me. Here are some interesting excerpts from mail exchanges that continued for days to come. It is a long chain but please totally worth it…

—————–

now to install requirements… I think that is a good point that apple never released this as general purpose.. I stand corrective on that.
Now that I think it has always been their strategy and from my perspective there is nothing wrong with that . As a product owner that reduces my suport matrix and increases upsell of other products.
Of course it is good for apple. But not so good for the customer. Another company doing the same would be seen as monopolistic practice and would attract antitrust lawsuits.

That brings up another point we discussed.

EU’s lawsuit against MSFT: http://www.pcworld.com/article/173253/microsoft_eu_reach_accord_on_antitrust.html

From this link, the main beef that EU had with MSFT was that MSFT gave IE unfair advantage over rival browsers.

“To address the browser case the software giant has offered to create a new ballot screen inside its Windows operating system that lists a maximum of 12 browsers and gives them all exactly the same visibility and ease of use as IE.”

Now, do we see a mac version with a choice of 12 browsers any time soon?

———-

I think it is great for the customer to have something that works well and is cheaper than all the pieces put together or may be even slightly expensive (apple is getting much better here)… and comes all pre packaged. As a consumer, choice is not improtant quality is and if I need to go to something else, I can always take the extra step to install that … so I think what I am saying is that the whole EU premise of anti-trust is something I dont agree. I am with MSFT on that as far as they let you disable IE which they did not and that is where it started 4 years back.

We should continue this over beer next time we meet…

——

Now, I know apple fan boys don’t want to hear anything against their favorite toys, but the talk about quality of mac is over hyped. My macbook from work crashes very regularly, is heavy, gets overheated and sometimes cannot connect to wifi until I reboot and also, sometimes when it comes back from standby, the screen remains black, forcing me to reboot. May be some of these issues have been addressed with snow leopard, but it does not sound not much different from vista. And then, I don’t know of too many people who don’t run windows on their mac (either by boot camp or by parallels/vmware) to run applications that are not supported on mac.

beer will be nice…

——-

We stopped exchange emails on this topic and agreed to disagree… then something happened 4 days back which is very relevant to this topic… my mac died! There goes my claim for quality! It is not over though… What happened after that in the next blog entry.

TED: Awesome demo of a new desktop interface

Cool Desktop interface… but I tell you that I would not use it

TED: David Logan on tribal leadership

Very interesting perspective on organizations…

Technical Support is Technical Support – Apple Genius??

When you are dealing with Apple, you expect everything to be perfect. That is a great image for a company to have but this morning I had not so good experience with the 1-800-APL-CARE. I am usually not one of the people to call the support lines and I really believe in do it yourself but last weekend, I was trying to setup an airport extreme with an external hardisk to perform backups on network.I could not get this to work and looked for information google, help, manuals and tried all possible configurations. The very same day I was in apple store and decided to talk to an apple genius about this. The genius had no answer but a card with 1800APLCARE.

So I called 1800APLCARE this morning and the call went exactly as it had gone with any other technical support

Reboot the extreme…

unplug the hard disk…

Factory reset the extreme…

reboot windows PC and Mac…

nothing worked… now he transferred me to a specialist. The fun part is that specialist sounded very knowledgeable by the talks and then I gave him my problem so he asked me to check more configurations and after 15 minutes put me on hold to look for more information.

After 10 minutes of wait, here is what he comes back with: “I talked to a specialist on airport extreme and he tells me that when apple released time capsule, they disabled all the usb ports on airport extreme so this configuration is not supported!.”

I was shocked!

While he was taking me through all these configuration screens, I noticed the log messages link and clicked that. I have to stay that I really believe in apple’s engineering team and they did have great logs and I saw an error “Unrecognized file system NTFS”. I guessed that airport extreme cannot work with NTFS drives well. I reformatted the drive to use MacOS extended and everything worked magically.

I am willing to pay per call fees if I can get good quality technical support for products… Would you?

Google Wave – Will it replace email?

I recently saw a video of google wave demo and I have to see it is pretty cool. Some of the things that have been within browser are amazing but the real question is that will it replace email?

I think the question can be rephrased as “Will people talk in groups?”. If you think about invention of email, it was just an electronic version of the same way people have been communicating for ages (person to person). Twitter and other forms are causing a little bit of social change where people would like to advertise themselves and may be interact in groups more than they used to but I still believe that fundamentally humans feel comfortable when chatting with one person and hence email will not go away…

May be people will use google wave as email!

Is Facebook and linkedin your new Addressbook?

I am having really tough time managing my address book and keeping it current. There are few options out there like plaxo but nothing that works well across personal and business contacts and also syncs with all the different gadgets and other sites. 25% of my contacts in outlook are duplicate and not current!

I strongly think that Facebook and LinkedIn should step up to meet this need.

What a nice break!

I am back from a really long blogging break. I hope to be regular in blogosphere going forward.

Why is Facebook competing with Twitter?

Facebook today announced the new stream API to deliver a real time updates on people’s status. I think Facebook is at a point where they can pick their competition and by this move they are declaring Twitter as their competition. I strongly believe that this is a stupid move as Facebook has much more to offer than just realtime updates and they can actually create a great ecosystem by focusing on other areas like picture sharing, event handling, groups capability.

Twitter is really good in what they are doing and it will be pretty tough and stupid of them to go after Facebook strengths. In my opinion these are two different players and both of them can own the same persons profile (in fact share the profile) and not compete for the profile.

This looks like to me a bad direction decision by Facebook. They will now be declaring a war and fighting it on twitter’s grounds and rules. Can they win that?

History of Marketing

This is a really good video(cartoon) on how marketing evolved to current social media based marketing.